


illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs

by impossiblyincredible



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Other, and this is that, but before the incinerations, i am a giant fan of them learning how to keep going despite how different they both are now, post-resurrection, they're best friends your honor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27981636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossiblyincredible/pseuds/impossiblyincredible
Summary: Just as he’s about to fall asleep and (possibly) disappear from existence for a little while, he hears footsteps. It’s two in the goddamn morning and the team would’ve just gotten off a flight from Dallas, he thinks, annoyed. Who in their right mind—“Mike? Are you—uh, are you in here?”Oh, Christ.
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers & Mike Townsend
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs

**Author's Note:**

> hello! i very much subscribe to the mike-and-jaylen-were-best-friends idea and i wanted to explore what happens when an eldritch horror splort indescribably changes two people, so i hope you enjoy!

Mike finds himself at the Big Garage a lot. When he’s not thinking about  _ being _ anywhere in particular, that’s where he ends up, probably because that’s where he slipped into the shadows in the first place, and it’s the closest he’s going to come to ever getting back to the sun. Not— not that he’s going to, he thinks, with a twinge of irony. He’ll just keep coming back here.

His eyes are closing without his permission, and every time he blinks, he sees static, so he knows it’s probably time for him to sleep. Or… whatever passes for sleep at this point. It’s a long way from Dallas, but the Garages were playing an away game there, and he figured...well. He doesn’t know what he figured. Jaylen wasn’t pitching, even though Mike thought she was, and he swallows hard, telling himself that he probably just spaced out for a week, that it still  _ feels _ like a Seattle winter, that he didn’t miss too much time. Arturo was next on the rotation anyway, and he played well enough that Mike stayed to watch.

Just as he’s about to fall asleep and (possibly) disappear from existence for a little while, he hears footsteps. It’s two in the goddamn morning and they would’ve just gotten off a flight from Dallas, he thinks, annoyed. Who in their right mind—

“Mike? Are you—uh, are you in here?”

Oh, Christ. 

Of course it’s Jaylen. He takes a deep breath, trying to calm his frantic heartbeat. She would have been looking for him—that’s the only way anyone can find him, so she must be wanting to talk to him. About  _ what _ , Mike doesn’t quite know; it’s been months, and he’s gotten nothing from her. Absolute, overwhelming, painful nothing.

But it’s okay. Jaylen’s here now, and she came looking for him. That’s what matters.

“Jaylen,” he says, with a voice that’s so hoarse from disuse that it almost makes him sound like Lenny. He would laugh if his heart wasn’t in his throat. Coughing a little, he says it again, louder. “Jaylen. I’m over here.”

She turns, and for one terrifying moment her eyes slide right over him. But right as his gut seizes up, she does a double take, and just like that, she comes into full focus, and Mike knows that he has too.

“Hi,” Jaylen starts, and you would really think that her voice would echo, Mike thinks, if you were really committed to the drama of the thing, but the silence of the stadium swallows it up like the grave. She’s staring at him, but she looks more guarded than someone who’s just seen a ghost, and she generally cuts a pretty intimidating figure, but she’s never looked smaller, standing there with her shoulders closed in on herself halfway between the home plate and the pitching mound, and—

“Hey,” he replies, standing up slowly. “How have you been?” It feels like the stupid question to ask.

Jaylen snorts, but there’s no real laughter in it, and she looks like she agrees. “Great. Just great. We should talk.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He says, sizing her up. She looks different, somehow. If anything, dying would do that, Mike thinks. “You wanna sit?”

She glances down at the dirt and back up at him pointedly, but she nods. 

They sit, facing the outfield, and Jaylen leans back on her hands, taking a deep breath and staring straight up. Mike glances between her and the pitch black sky. He decides to pretend he can still see the stars.

———

Nobody fucking tells you, Jaylen thinks, how much it  _ hurts _ to come back from the dead. She opens her eyes, and for one brief, perfect moment, everything is still, but as soon as she takes her first staggering inhale, the pain sets in. The air claws its way down her throat, into her lungs, through her bloodstream, and the worst part is that she  _ feels _ it all the way, burning through her. When she checks her pulse, it’s dangerously slow.

Her body is so beyond achingly heavy (or is all her strength gone?),and it takes her a few minutes to be able to prop herself up on her elbows, squinting against the light. Already she’s on edge—what else do you do when every breath kills you? Or actually, very much doesn’t do that, right? Jaylen would laugh if she could at the sheer irony of it. 

Rolling over is a feat in and of itself, and when she sits up, she finds herself staring at her own room, fully foreign in its familiarity. She’s home, in the apartment. How the fuck is she home?

As it happens, it takes her some time to make her way out of bed and into the hallway, and it takes even more to get used to her own body again. It’s two hours before she needs to use her voice again, and that's when she sees Tot asleep in  _ Mike’s fucking bed_, jostling him awake. Tears in his eyes, he says that they’d finally done it, she’s awake because they’d brought her  _ back _ .

Why is he saying it like she should be grateful?

There’s some stuff about an egg, to which she responds with a blank stare, some stuff about Mike not being here right now and that they would tell her about it later, to which she responds with an incredulous  _ What?, _ and some stuff about next season, to which she doesn’t respond at all. He comments on how feverish she feels, suggests maybe taking it easy for a while, as if she’s capable of doing literally anything else. She wants to call Dreamy. She wants to go back to sleep. 

Jaylen almost feels like curling up and crying, but Tot’s still talking about letting the rest of the team know she’s actually alive, as opposed to the fucking coma patient she must’ve been, so she forces the panic down and tries to control her breathing. Down, down, down it goes until it settles like an anchor in the pit of her stomach instead of clogging up her throat, and yeah, that’s not much better, but she’s going to have to be able to have this conversation, so she takes a deep breath. Inhale, look away, exhale, look back at him. The whole goddamn team’s going to be here in ten minutes. She’ll fucking make it work.

Hours later, when she’s finally, finally alone again, her skin still burns, and when she lets out a shaky exhale, her breath steams in the air. 

———

Understanding settles over Mike, sinking like lead into his not-quite corporeal bones. “You… you didn’t want to come back.”

Jaylen just nods.

“Because the void was, what,  _ peaceful _ ?” He can’t keep the disbelief out of his voice, but surprisingly enough, Jaylen doesn’t snap back at him for it, staring at the seats on the other end of the stadium.

“It wasn’t  _ this _ ,” she says, and her voice is wooden. Empty. 

“You… love blaseball, though,” Mike says, almost just for the sake of saying it. They’re well past either of them  _ loving _ blaseball, but it seems like the thing to address.

“Yeah, like fucking  _ heroin _ ,” Jaylen spits out. “The void wasn’t—it wasn’t anything. I don’t remember it. All I remember is waking up after, and Mike, that was—” A shuddering inhale. “I don’t know. I can’t describe it. But it wasn’t this.”

Oh,  _ Christ _ . “And I brought you back.”

“I mean,” Jaylen says. “Technically everyone did. Team fuckin effort.” She draws that last part out with a skeletal, ghostly smile on her face, and Mike thinks that if he were just slightly more of a person it would’ve made him physically sick to the stomach. As it stands, he just swallows hard and looks away.

“Is that why you didn’t come try to talk to me?” Mike asks instead.

“Well, for the first couple weeks, I didn’t know I could.”

He slants her a look.

“Yeah, okay, maybe I needed some time, jackass,” she replies acidly. Jaylen offers no apology, staring straight up into the night, and that knowledge is oddly comforting, because it means she isn’t expecting one from him either. They’ve always been good at that, airing things out first. She humors his questions, he processes it all, and then they decide what to do next. That’s how it’s always been, and he sees no reason to change it now, even after everything.

“And—” Jaylen exhales hard, still not looking at him. “There’s more. Have you noticed the scorch marks in the bullpen?”

“...No?” Mike asks, twisting to look behind them.

“Then don’t bother— I think I’m the only one who can see them.”

Mike already doesn’t like where this is going. “Scorch marks? Like, from actual fire?”

Jaylen laughs humorlessly. “Yeah no, whatever you’re thinking, you’re right. I come down here to practice alone sometimes, and my pitches are entirely different. Not different like, ‘I haven’t touched a ball in years on account of being  _ dead _ ’ different, but like, ‘this fucking blaseball’s on  _ fire _ ’ different.”

“Thats…” 

“And,” she continues, voice cracking, “none of the others can see them, and I’m pretty sure Teddy and Malik think I’m clinically insane because I mentioned scorch marks that don’t  _ fucking _ exist, so I’m just sitting here, potentially with the power to hurt people  _ really _ badly, Mike, and, I don’t know, maybe I am insane, maybe I came back wrong, but  _ somehow _ , I don’t think so.”

He tries to wrap his mind around that.

“It feels like something’s coming.” She almost whispers that last part, but she sounds so utterly certain that Mike glances around them, just to make sure they’re alone. “So yeah.” She presses two fingers to her neck. “Hell of a year.”

How do you even respond to that? He wants to wrap his arms around her, force her to let go of that tension for a few seconds at least, but it’s no use. He’d tried hugging Teddy, way back when he’d retreated here and had slipped right through him. Still, though. Can’t shake the impulse. 

That’s just how blaseball is, right? No one comes out unscathed. No survivors, he thinks absently, and he lets out a short little laugh. Well. One survivor. 

"Jay."

"Yeah?" Her voice is hollow, and Mike very deliberately doesn't look at her as she replies. What he'll see on her face, he doesn't know.

"What do we do now?" Because it’s always been  _ we _ , ever since middle school, and Mike can’t picture a world where they don’t work it out together. 

A pause. Mike doesn’t hear her breathing.

"You move back in," she says, tersely. Her tone doesn't leave much room for argument, but he hears it, the second, unspoken part of that sentence.  _ If you want to. If you can. _

Mike lets out a hum of acknowledgement. Maybe before the shadows he would've reacted more to that particular surprise. "Oh. Okay."

Jaylen looks at him then, eyebrows raised. "That easy? I thought it would've been a whole thing to convince you."

"Oh no, did you write a speech?”

"Fuck off."

"So you did." Mike almost smiles at that, picturing Jaylen trying to come up with something to get him to come home, as if he would’ve said literally anything but yes. 

"But seriously," Jaylen says. "I would get if—"

"Nah," Mike says, staring out at the Big Garage. "Had enough of this place."

"Mm."

"You have too," he says, mildly defensive of  _ what _ , he doesn't know. "Don't even lie. You don't wanna be here any more than I do."

Jaylen opens her mouth, then closes it again, then says, "I want to  _ want _ to be here, I guess."

And that, more than anything, throws everything else into perfect clarity. Mike had always loved blaseball, but he'd never been as bad as Jaylen. She'd lived it, breathed it, suffered it. Loved and been loved by it, hated and been hated by it right back.

And now she's… something else entirely. A rogue player, a martyred hero, someone who can, apparently, throw flaming curveballs. Jaylen changed. But so did he, just in the opposite direction, and if he unfocuses his eyes a bit, doesn’t think too hard about the whole thing, it almost cancels out, leaving them right back where they started. Easy enough to deal with. 

“Mike.”

“Hm?”

“I would’ve done the same thing.”

“Is that your way of saying you forgive me for literally dragging you kicking and screaming out of the only peace you might’ve ever had just to keep playing this awful, fucked-up game we’re all trapped in? Is that what you’re saying?” 

“Uh-huh.” Zero hesitation. 

Mike swallows past the lump in his throat. “This is like, the first time in my life that I can call you too forgiving, and it’s for  _ this_? Seems a little on the nose.”

She barks out a laugh at that, and as they lapse into a more comfortable sort of silence, the corners of his mouth tug up in a faint smile.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! i'm on tumblr as @goodwinmorin so come talk to me there about blaseball, or leave a comment if you like <3


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